Burmese Battle Lines Harden as Military Stays Loyal to Regime

For nearly a month, Burma’s soldiers stayed in their barracks as anti-government marchers filled the streets of Rangoon and provincial cities pressing for democracy.

Civil servants walked off their jobs, transportation broke down, a few hundred enlisted men defected to the demonstrators’ ranks and Maung Maung, the country’s first civilian president in a quarter century, made political concessions.

In a tumultuous Burma, the question was: Which way would the army jump?

Last Sunday, Defense Minister Saw Maung announced that the military had seized power “to curb further deterioration of the general situation.” The army had chosen sides--or had it?

To many Burma analysts, the decision was not unexpected. A week earlier, Josef Silverstein, a U.S. specialist, had posed the question, then answered it. The military, he said, “is the only organized force in the country. Whoever gains its loyalty controls the state.”

Silverstein said that in his view, “the army is still 100% behind Ne Win (the longtime Burmese strongman) and Maung Maung. They’re in the ramparts, and I don’t see any shift in their loyalty.”

Last week’s heavy-handed repression of protests against the military takeover has posed a new question: Was the army’s monthlong silence a charade?

Opposition political leaders in Rangoon quickly discarded any lingering hopes. Despite Saw Maung’s pledge that the military would hold democratic elections once order is restored, they branded the takeover a mere “technical transfer of power” from Maung Maung to the army chief, both longtime loyalists of Ne Win.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, the hero of Burmese independence and founder of the Burmese army, called Saw Maung’s announcement “a false coup.”

Bertil Lintner, a Bangkok-based Burma specialist, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review, said the takeover “and some of the chaos which led to it appears to have been carefully orchestrated to give it the semblance of military intervention in the national interest.”

He said observers “believe the army has merely dropped its political fig leaf, the hitherto ruling Burma Socialist Program Party,” and that Ne Win is still directing the course of Burma, as he has since he struck down the country’s first and only democratic government in a 1962 coup.

According to Lintner, Saw Maung was summoned to Ne Win’s home in Rangoon last Sunday morning and given his orders. Maung Maung, a jurist, was told he was no longer head of state. That night, the army left its barracks and moved into the streets of the capital--portrayed by government-controlled radio as the reluctant savior of a nation in chaos.

Lintner, other analysts and opposition leaders had suggested all along that to some extent, the violence and rumors that preceded the takeover were the work of government provocateurs, setting up a justification for military action.

Now, the military has returned to the position it held immediately after Ne Win’s 1962 coup, before the ruling party was created as a front for the power of the armed forces and a vehicle for the distribution of military privilege.

For Burma’s democratic forces, the picture is at least clearer, but the prospects are far less bright than they seemed just weeks ago.

In Rangoon last week, the soldiers showed little reluctance to fire on protesters. In a city beset by desperate shortages of food and fuel, the 180,000-man military reportedly has plenty. While striking workers have little to spend on the inflated black market, the troops have been paid regularly.

As a fighting force, the Burmese army has been described by foreign analysts as “tough, lean and mean.”

Hardened by years of war against guerrilla forces of ethnic minorities, the army has proved effective and loyal. Its leaders are committed to a system of special privilege.

The Burmese soldier is primarily a guerrilla fighter, in many cases armed with outdated weapons purchased mainly from West Germany, Sweden, Yugoslavia and the United States. The U.S. hardware is largely tied to Burma’s war against opium smugglers.

The soldiers are well trained and disciplined, according to foreign military attaches in Bangkok.

If loyalty in the ranks holds, the opposition has few weapons to match the military beyond a continuation of protest strikes and a possible terrorist campaign by increasingly radicalized students.